As the Rome Snowboard Design Syndicate (SDS) introduces its tenth collection of product, releases its third  full-length video and builds upon its assortment of grassroots snowboard events, one thing continues to dominate the company’s approach—make sure everything is grounded fun. Perhaps that’s why Rome continues to be snowboarding’s fastest growing brand.

At the most fundamental level, the Rome SDS was started in 1985 by two high school kids. They just didn’t know it yet. That winter, the future co-founders of the company, Josh Reid and Paul Maravetz, were seniors in high school, unknown to one another and separated by several hundred miles. But they each took one first step that would ultimately bring them together in business.

Back in 1985, snowboarding was in its embryonic rather than infancy stage. Long before terrain parks, the X-Games and well before even a handful of resorts allowed riders up on their lifts, Josh and Paul independently hiked up local sledding hills, strapped into early-era snowboards, slashed their first turns, and dragged their first knuckle. Well before snowboarding dominated the Olympics, Josh and Paul hiked those hills for one reason… snowboarding is fun.

For Josh and Paul, like for many who have learned the hedonism of sliding sideways, snowboarding would realign the priorities of their lives from that point forward.

After those first turns in 1985, it took the Rome SDS another 17 years to get off the ground. In the intervening period, Rome’s future founders became heavily involved in the emerging scene of snowboarding through its formative years of the late 80s and early 90s — spending years arranging university class schedules to accommodate snowboarding and subsequent years working low-end jobs in western resort towns to ride every day. During the second half of those 17 years, they both began to make careers in the business side of snowboarding, spearheading innovative product and marketing for the most recognized brand in snowboarding today, Burton Snowboards.

During the late 1990s, the snowboard industry went into a dark period. Snowboarding’s tremendous growth was followed by massive industry consolidation. The business of snowboarding fell into the hands of people unfamiliar with its culture and apathetic towards its intrinsic worth — people who simply saw snowboarding as a new revenue stream for a broader corporate entity. Not surprisingly, it was a phase in which the industry stagnated and deviated from the primary values of snowboarding.

In 2000, with a combined 30 years of living and working in snowboarding between them, Josh and Paul decided to take advantage of a latent opportunity to fill a void in snowboarding. They came to the conclusion that it was time to break away and re-consolidate snowboarding around a direction based on the values that got them into riding in the first place.

Josh and Paul spent the following winter in a marginally-heated office above a garage in Stowe, VT, planning the specifics of how to launch and build this new direction. Broad concepts, precise ideas, product planning, brand logos and the business fundamentals were proposed, discussed, revised and then revised again. The manifesto that emerged as the winter thawed out was to bring together a diverse group of people who care deeply about snowboarding in order to create a powerful brand that lives the values of snowboarding and innovates products that increase the one thing that matters most in snowboarding: fun.

What went down in the winter of 2000-2001 in that garage office was the birth of snowboard-nationalism—a riding-fixated, innovation-based movement to put snowboarders in control of snowboarding.

Rome’s gamble that snowboarders care about what’s under their feet, and aren’t indifferent to the values and philosophies for which the brands they support stand, seems to have been right on target. Six years, multiple hiccups, and many sleep-deprived nights later, the Rome SDS has established itself as the fastest growing brand in snowboarding by connecting with more and more riders, listening to them, and laying down award-winning products designed to dominate on the hill.

Twenty years after making those inaugural turns on the golf courses of Massachusetts and New Jersey, the founders of the Rome SDS continue to seek out the hedonism of sliding sideways and to merge it with the business side of snowboarding. Rome’s constant progression on the slopes and in the marketplace continues to realign snowboarding with the true values of snowboarding, and with people who in some way have realigned their lives with riding as well… people who consider themselves snowboarder

Buoloco 2010